Sonic Free Riders barely works, shows issue with Kinect jumping

Sonic comes to the Microsoft Kinect and surprise! The game is a mess. Here's …

One of the games missing from our blow-out review of Microsoft's Kinect was Sonic Free Riders, and I've finally had time to try it, figure out what I was doing wrong, and try it again. To make a long story short, I didn't feel like I could review it, because I didn't feel like I was ever able to make the game work properly.

The game puts Sonic on a hoverboard, and you race him along a series of tracks by leaning back and forward to turn left and right. I did very poorly during a calibration sequence where you need to weave between a few cones, which the game seemed to think was fine. During actual gameplay I simply couldn't get Sonic to turn in a smooth, controllable way. I would over- or under-correct, and I was rarely able to finish a track in any kind of competitive way. The game felt horrible, and rarely seemed to pick out my movements accurately. I tried recalibrating, I made sure the Kinect was working, but nothing helped.

Sonic Free Riders

To get air off the ramps you have to jump in place, and that's a big problem for immersion. You see, real people don't float. We jump, and then come straight back down, and that's it. But in many video games you have multiple seconds of hangtime, and you can use that time to adjust your angle, do some tricks, etc. But in a game that seeks to use your movements to control the actions, that's conceptually confusing. So I jump, which the game sees simply as a button press to get me in the air, and then when I land in real life I have to pretend I'm still in the air and control my actions. That's not motion control, that's waggle.

After reading a few other reviews, I'm glad to hear I wasn't alone in my frustration. "Before every race, you take part in a sort of short pre-race, during which you weave between cones in what seems to be an attempt to calibrate the game to your range of motion," Joystiq's review stated. "In my experience, it didn't appear to lessen my need to contort my body and make sweeping, exaggerated arm movements in order to feel like I was only vaguely in control of my character."

The game also uses goofy little motions to fire the Mario Kart-like weapons, and you can kick off with your foot as if you were on a skateboard. Unsurprisingly, these motions only worked a percentage of the time.

With Kinect games, the basic mechanics and "feel" are of the utmost importance, and Sonic Free Riders is painful to play, especially after I've found so many other launch games to be more enjoyable. Even when I was simply asked to angle my body to put my virtual feet on the board, simple movements made the indicator on the screen jump around crazily. This was the only game where the cursor would appear for no reason and skitter around the menus, even when I wasn't moving.

Was this rushed out? Poorly coded? Who knows. It's depressing to put up with something so clearly broken when so many of the launch games on the Kinect are so much fun. Stay away.